Automation can be a frightening topic for employees. One study found that automation causes so much anxiety over job security for managers and professionals that overall health is suffering significantly.

For contact center professionals, chatbots are often at the heart of this anxiety. By 2021, companies will invest as much as $4.5 billion in chatbot technology. And as AI-powered chatbots become more advanced, there are concerns that companies will try to replace contact center agents to cut costs.

But there are plenty of reasons why this isn’t the right approach. Rather than looking at this as an “either/or” decision, you’ll find much more value in combining the powers of human agents and chatbots.

Where Chatbots Thrive

The hype surrounding chatbots reached a peak in 2016 and 2017 when major social media platforms were giving brands easy ways to automate customer interactions. Suddenly chatbots were going to completely change customer service. That is, until the hype fizzled out when it was clear that chatbot technology wasn’t up to the task of handling anything but the most basic customer queries.

Now, a few years later, the technology has matured, and expectations have evened off. Instead of seeing chatbots as set-it-and-forget-it replacements for agents, we can now focus on what this technology does best.

If you want to take advantage of chatbots, these are the three areas where they deliver the most value:

  • “Just in Time” Support: Your human agents can’t be available every second of every day. Even the most well-staffed contact centers that operate 24/7 have to put customers on hold at times. Chatbots can give customers on-demand at any time of any day.
  • Replacing the IVR: Frustration with interactive voice response (IVR) technology is a near-universal experience. The predefined rules often don’t match customer needs despite your best efforts. Chatbots can provide more flexible assistance, directing customers to the proper departments/agents/channels depending on their problems.
  • Maximizing Self Service: More and more of the customer lifecycle is shifting toward self-service. If you’re forcing customers to call a contact center for every question, you might lose them to competitors that are supporting self-service demands. Chatbots make it easier to build self-serve capabilities into the customer experience. Simple questions can be answered directly or the chatbot can direct customers to a piece of content that will help solve a problem.

When you try to stretch these capabilities too far, you end up with clunky user experiences that result in dissatisfied customers. Attempts at self-service end in frustration and result in traditional contact center calls anyway.

That’s why the focus should be on using these capabilities to fuel contact center agent productivity.

How Chatbots Boost Contact Center Productivity

The first key to chatbot success is a mindset shift. Instead of thinking about replacing people, focus on how chatbots can take routine tasks out of human hands so that your agents can focus on more complicated customer issues. The chatbot might gather all of the necessary information upfront before deciding that a human agent is necessary. Then, your contact center agent goes into the conversations with full context of the problem, ready to improve customer experiences by resolving issues more efficiently.

But the chatbot/agent relationship isn’t just about automating initial interactions and making a handoff. There are other benefits to getting these two sides working together. When your chatbots and agents work together, your contact center can:

  • Improve Internal Searches: Chatbot technology is usually discussed from a customer-facing perspective. But why not implement chatbots to improve internal operations? When agents can use a chatbot to navigate deep customer databases, they’ll be able to surface information more quickly and finish tasks faster.
  • Maximize Service Efficiency: Agents don’t have to completely take over for chatbots once they start engaging with a customer. With AI-powered chatbots involved, agents can get real-time service suggestions to resolve customer issues more effectively than if they were working from a memorized script or decision tree.
  • Provide Training Opportunities: One benefit of text-based customer interactions is that they’re easier to analyze than traditional phone calls. AI-powered chatbots give you the chance to analyze patterns of customer behavior. The trends you identify in these analyses can be used to train agents and improve customer experiences in the future.

Ultimately, chatbots are a user-friendly way to supercharge your contact center agents with artificial intelligence. While the self-serve benefits of chatbots will always exist, your greater opportunities lie in combining the powers of humans and this emerging technology.

Artificial intelligence is already transforming contact centers. Now is the time to take advantage of chatbot potential.